Earlier this year, Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek shook up Silicon Valley with a powerful open source model that could compete with Western systems at a fraction of the cost. Out of this shockwave was born Reflection AI, a New York-based startup founded by top artificial intelligence researchers that just raised $2 billion to develop similar accessibility technology. According to the New York Times, this round of financing valued the company at a staggering $8 billion.
Returning investors include Nvidia, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital, while new players include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm with ties to Donald Trump Jr. Reflection, which previously raised about $130 million from backers including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Meta executive Alexandr Wang, was last valued at about $550 million in March, according to Crunchbase.
Reflection AI emerged quietly earlier this year, co-founded by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou. Laskin previously founded Claire AI, a startup focused on predicting product demand for retailers. Antonoglou is DeepMind’s sixth researcher, working on the laboratory’s groundbreaking AlphaGo model. Reflection AI is currently hiring for 8 open positions in New York, San Francisco, and London. Its growing staff includes former employees of OpenAI, Meta, Character.AI, and Anthropic.
Like many of its competitors, Reflection aims to build superintelligence and focuses on autonomous coding tools. It recently released an artificial intelligence coding agent called Asimov. At the heart of its mission, however, is the belief that open source AI should be widely available to developers, researchers, and individual users.
Reflection’s ambitious goals were spurred by the shock of DeepSeek’s emergence—an event that many in the tech community likened to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik 1, which spurred America’s space race. “The reason we exist is we’re having the modern Sputnik moment,” Raskin, who is also Reflection’s CEO, told CNBC SquawkBox today (October 8). “When you think about the competitors we face today, it’s an incredibly open model from China.”
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into science, education, energy and supply chains, Reflection warns that concentrating this power in a few closed systems could stifle innovation and exclude other players. The company also believes that openness promotes safety, allowing a wider range of researchers, rather than a handful of private labs, to identify and address potential risks in AI systems.
Reflection is the latest artificial intelligence model builder to benefit from rising investor enthusiasm for the space. Global venture capital funding totaled $97 billion in the third quarter of 2025, according to Crunchbasean increase of 38% compared with the same period last year. Nearly half (about 46%) of this amount went to artificial intelligence companies, with the three largest rounds of financing this quarter raised by basic model companies Anthropic, xAI and Mistral AI.
